E3 2004: Sly Cooper: Band of Thieves - Hands-On

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Sly has a new adventure, and this time he's bringing his friends!

By Andrew Alfonso

In the world of Sony first party games, Sucker Punch's Sly Cooper stood out from the crowd for two reasons. First, it wasn't just another platformer, and secondly, it didn't feature a pint-sized sidekick that would spit out wisecrack after wisecrack. The developer's sophomore PS2 effort is a continuation of the first Sly Cooper, with the subtitle Band of Thieves. They hope that the many radical changes that they've made will bring new players into the fold.

The beginning of Sly 2: Band of Thieves recaps what happened in the first game. Clockwerk was defeated by Sly, and broken into several pieces. We pick up with Sly and his merry band of thieves breaking into a building in search of the Clockwerk pieces. Unfortunately for our heroes, the evil Klaww gang has stolen the pieces of Clockwerk, no doubt plotting to reassemble the pieces and bring him back to life.

Joining him on his journey are Bentley and Murray. Bentley is a wee little turtle, who's actually quite the expert on demolition. He doesn't enjoy being on the front lines, but he has no choice in order to get the job done. Bentley can attack in two ways. The first is his explosives, but he can also shoot darts that will momentarily stun his enemies so that he can plant the bombs without worry. Murray is the brawn of the group, with the ability to take on multiple enemies at a time without taking a lot of damage. Because of his size, he's able to take down obstacles that Sly normally would not be able to.

As you might have guessed, the emphasis with Sly 2: Band of Thieves is on the teamwork between Sly, Bentley and Murray. During the first mission of the game, you'll start off with Sly breaking into the building. He'll come across a structure that he can't get past, and then Bentley will swoop in and drop some bombs to allow Sly to continue. Later on, Sly will then come to a door that he can't open, and in will come Murray to bust it open. This is just a simple example of the teamwork that you'll have to use in the game. During one of the later missions in the demo available to us, we had to steal a certain item from a huge mansion. Using Bentley, we were able to create a diversion by destroying a bridge to alert all of the guards in the entire area, and then Sly would don a disguise to create a diversion, while Murray slowly crept up and stole the treasure.

The environments in Band of Thieves are similar in design and structure to that of the first game. You'll find many natural structures that have a sense of realism to them. You aren't going to see a lot of floating platforms around, nor are there any convenient outcroppings to lean against. Everything in the world has been smartly designed to actually look like it belongs. This is the same philosophy that Sucker Punch has used for many of the boss encounters in the game. They simply won't be set pieces in a stage for you to fight; you'll actually meet them very early on, and often there will be objectives that involve them before the actual confrontation happens. In one of the first stages we played, we had to shadow a man named Dimitri as he traveled from his house to his little club. Once we had done that, we had to create a diversion to get his guards away, and then we were able to confront Dimitri face to face. Scenarios like this go a long way in establishing the main players in the game before actually fighting them, and make the game a lot more believable in terms of story.

From the demo build that we were able to play, the controls are still very responsive and easy to use, and using the two new characters proved to be very intuitive. The guards are smarter now, responding to almost every move that you make in their presence. You can still trick guards into simple traps, but a lot of times they will not fall for it if they actually spot you. The music in Band of Thieves has been tremendously improved over the first game. Ditching the regular MIDI tracks, the game uses streaming music, playing up to nine tracks at a time. Five tracks are dedicated to the actual music, while 4 are used for environmental effects. Something that is disappointing with the game is that there are no online features at all. Sucker Punch explained that they felt that the single player was strong enough to stand on its own, but it's a shame that the option won't be there for eager players.

Fans can expect September to be the expected release month for the release of Sly 2: Band of Thieves. Sure, there might not be any online play in the game like with Rise of the Kasai and the new Ratchet and Clank title, but the major changes that have been made by Sucker Punch is reason enough to get excited over this title. Considering how well-executed Thievius Racoonus was, fans of the series will no doubt be excited about Band of Thieves.